Meteorological Images of January 2013

Sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) events have, alas, sometimes been sensationalized and misrepresented during recent years in this social media age -- they don't all result in the same extreme outcome weatherwise in a given location -- but the science involved is legit and there have been papers published on the topic for more than 60 years. These graphics, among the coolest (no pun intended) meteorological ones I've ever seen, show the polar vortex in the process of splitting following this winter's SSW.

While Alaska is in its long dark winter, south of the equator it's now summer, and this intense tropical cyclone had a dramatic appearance on this water vapor satellite image when northwest of Australia. Narelle's strongest part stayed offshore and eventually the cyclone weakened.

Another swirl in the Southern Hemisphere had some characteristics of a developing tropical cyclone even though it was completely over land. A couple days after this satellite image, the system as it moved southeast brought flooding rains to Mozambique.

After the deep cyclone in the previous image came another one, larger and stronger, which produced enormous waves. This model forecast showed significant wave heights (average of the top 1/3) of more than 50 feet. I'm not aware of any observations at that particular location, but measurements at a buoy not far away suggested that these predicted wave heights were generally accurate.

And a gigantic cyclone over the North Pacific looked similar to the last of the North Atlantic cyclone images above. Both storms had exceptionally low central pressures, which also fell at a rate far exceeding the requirement for being a meteorological bomb.

Just offshore of New England, although it didn't have a true eyewall, the center of the winter storm that TWC named Jove took on the appearance of an eye. To the west cold air streamed in behind the storm and so did lake-effect snowbands off the Great Lakes. Erie, Pennsylvania had its largest snow amount on a calendar day in January in records that go back to the late 1800s.

The day prior, Jove produced bursts of snow (top image) on its southwest flank which resulted in a tragic series of vehicular accidents. After the snow came through, a patchwork of clouds moved in (bottom image).

As the humid, warm air surged north and east, it led to this anomalous sight. In midwinter, you'd expect that a line of intense precipitation on radar coming in off of Lake Erie would be one of those lake-effect snowbands like with Jove that can produce whiteout conditions and persist. But this was a line of thunderstorms, and it was sweeping rapidly through.

CONVECTIVE BANDS

That extreme moisture along with record high temperatures, explosively unstable air, and strong winds throughout the atmosphere including an exceptionally high-velocity low-level jet led to a supercharged atmosphere, heavy rain & flash flooding, an extraordinarily massive outbreak of severe thunderstorms, one of the largest January tornado outbreaks on record, and an incredibly vivid banding structure on this satellite image shortly before a high-end-EF3 tornado hit Adairsville, Georgia, the convective bands oriented perpendicular to the SSW-NNE line of thunderstorms.